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An anonymous reader writes "Anyone who is a fan of the games created by Looking Glass Studios (System Shock, Thief) or the Ultima Underworld series by Blue Sky Productions, will no doubt count Arx Fatalis on their list of owned and completed games.

What’s interesting about Arx Fatalis is that development of the game started up again last year even though the original shipped in 2002 (Windows, Xbox). Arkane Studios released patch 1.21 and with it open sourced the engine. That led to an new project called Arx Libertatis, which aimed to update the game to be played on multiple modern operating systems including Windows and Linux.

As the original game was for PC and Xbox, it relied heavily on DirectX. Arx Libertatis changed that by porting the engine to use SDL, OpenGL, and OpenAL so as to open up compatibility for other systems. They’ve also fixed a number of glitches the original game had, updated the rendering system, video resolutions, and implemented a port to the amd64 architecture.